By now most of you probably know that the newest version of the Ubuntu has been released. Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 was released about a week ago. This is the second Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. The LTS desktop versions are supported for 3 years and the server edition for 5 years.

I have installed Hardy on my laptop (HP dv2000t) and have had few problems so far. From what I can tell Hardy seems to be a step in the right direction. For me, the jump to Hardy came from Feisty (7.04) via a fresh install. I tried Guty (7.10) but had several problems on both my latop and desktop. However, I know several people who had no problems at all. I will be upgrading my desktop in a few days and I hope the transition goes as well as it did with my laptop.

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For those of you who don’t know whats new in Hardy Heron, let me give you a quick overview. For more information, check out the Ubuntu Features page.

To start off, Wubi is now on the installation CD, so you can install it without having to download it separately. Wubi is a way to install Ubuntu from Windows. Wubi is great for people who want to try Ubuntu but are afraid of messing up their Windows installation in the process. If you try Ubuntu via Wubi and don’t like it, all you have to do is uninstall it in Windows and you’re done.

There are updated versions of all your favorite software including Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, etc. There is also a new bit torrent client named Transmission which is installed by default. If you are Mac user, you are probably already familiar with Transmission. There is also a new VNC viewer installed.

For the next several Linux Friday’s I will be covering how to setup and use Ubuntu Hardy Heron. These posts will include using everything from installing Ubuntu using a Wubi, to checking your system temperatures using lmsensors. So be sure to check back for our newest Linux Friday posts. Check out the WLMTips Extras section in the sidebar to be sure you don’t miss a single post.

For some more information on the newest version of Ubuntu, visit Linux Format: Hands on with Ubuntu 8.04.

To get your copy of the Ubuntu live CD, visit the download page.

Deluge is light weight BitTorrent client for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The makers of Deluge realize that you use your computer for much more than just downloading. Therefore, why should you use a BitTorrent client that is so system intensive you can’t use your computer for anything else? The answer is you shouldn’t. To fix this they created Deluge.

What I love the most about Deluge is that it is simple and easy to use. The first time you run the program it will guide you through a short configuration of the preferences. If you aren’t sure what one of the preferences means, simply hover your mouse over that setting and a dialog box will appear giving more information. There aren’t that many settings compared to similar programs. This is one of the reasons Deluge is so light weight. However, to me it seems Deluge included the settings we use the most, like download/upload limits. For those of you who are worried about security, encryption is built into Deluge.

Just because Deluge is small, light weight, and unobtrusive doesn’t mean that it can’t do everything those other BitTorrent clients can. In fact, the great thing about Deluge is that all those extra features are available through plugins. Now I know you may be thinking, but I don’t want to download a plugin every time I need to add functionality to Deluge. Well guess what, you don’t; all the plugins for Deluge are available in the preferences menu. To enable a new plugin, you simply place a check mark next to the plugin you wish to activate.

For Linux, Deluge was designed to work with any distribution as well just about any desktop environment including GNOME, KDE, and XFCE. As stated above, Deluge is also available for Windows and Mac OS X as well. To get your copy of Deluge, please visit their download page. There you will find Deluge available in packages for your favorite distribution, as well as the source code.

If you would like to learn a little more about Deluge, be sure to check out their about page, as well as Wikipedia’s page on Deluge.

Images were taken from the following places respectively:

http://cia.vc/images/db/56/e.png

http://deluge-torrent.org/images/plugin.png